Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-7qhmt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T16:35:42.163Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Regional and Social Dialectology of the BATH Vowel in South African English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Rajend Mesthrie
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
Alida Chevalier
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
Timothy Dunne
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town

Abstract

This paper provides the beginnings of a pan–South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2010), yielding bivariate data on vowel quality. Statistical analysis via analysis of variance focused on sets of five persons in each of 40 city-ethnicity-gender combinations. Overall, no city shows cohesion across all ethnic groups, though Kimberley, the smallest of the cities, and Johannesburg, the largest, come close. Conversely, no ethnicity shows cohesion across all cities, although Black speakers of traditional L2 English background come close. There is a robust regional difference for Colored speakers between Johannesburg and the other cities. Gender effects are notable: women's means are closer to the historically prestige [ɑ:] variant than the historically broader variant [ɔ:] in 6 of 20 possible groupings by city and ethnicity; in none of the cases is the opposite true.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adank, Patti, Smits, Roel, & van Hout, Roeland. (2004). A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116(5):30993107.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Agnihotri, Rama Kant, & Singh, Rajendra. (eds.). (2012). Indian English: Towards a new paradigm. Noida, India: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar
Bauer, Matt. (2012). Oral presentation presented at: Workshop on Best Practices in Sociophonetics. NWAV 41, Indiana University, October 2012.Google Scholar
Bekker, Ian. (2012). South African English as a late 19th-century extraterritorial variety. English World-Wide 33(2):127146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bekker, Ian, & Ely, Georgina. (2007). An acoustic analysis of White South African English monophthongs. Southern African Journal of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies 25(1):107114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2010). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. (Version 5.1.45). Available at: www.praat.org. Accessed December 1, 2013.Google Scholar
Bruce, M. C. 1919. The golden vessel. Cape Town: Juta.Google Scholar
Buthelezi, Qedusizi. (1995). South African Black English: Lexical and syntactic characteristics. In Mesthrie, R. (ed.), Language and social history: Studies in South African sociolinguistics. Cape Town: David Philip. 242250.Google Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia. (2009). Computational methods for normalizing acoustic vowel data for talker differences. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(6):14301442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian. (2006). Corpus linguistics and world Englishes: A study of Xhosa English. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
De Villiers, M., & Ponelis, Fritz. (1987). Afrikaanse Klankleer. Cape Town: Tafelberg.Google Scholar
Di Paolo, Marianna, Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, & Wassink, Alicia. (2011). Analysing vowels. In Di Paolo, M., & Yaeger-Dror, M. (eds.), Sociophonetics: A student's guide. Oxford: Routledge. 87106.Google Scholar
Finn, Peter. 2004. Cape Flats English: Phonology. In Schneider, E. G., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R., & Upton, C. (eds.), A handbook of the varieties of English. Vol. 1: Phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 964984.Google Scholar
Gimson, Alfred C. (1962). An introduction to the pronunciation of English. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Hopwood, David. (1928). South African English pronunciation. Cape Town: Juta.Google Scholar
Jones, Daniel. (1962). An outline of English phonetics. 9th ed.Cambridge: Heffer.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (1984). Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In Baugh, J. & Sherzer, J. (eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. 2853.Google Scholar
Labov, William. (2010). Principles of linguistic change. Vol. 3: Cognitive and cultural factors. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Ash, Sherry, & Boberg, Charles. (2006). The atlas of North American English. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanham, Leonard. (1967). The pronunciation of South African English. Cape Town: Balkema.Google Scholar
Lanham, Leonard. (1978). South African English. In Lanham, L. W. & Prinsloo, K. P. (eds.), Language and communication studies in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. 138165.Google Scholar
Lanham, Leonard, & Macdonald, Carol. (1979). The standard in South African English and its social history. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lass, Roger. (1995). South African English. In Mesthrie, R. (ed.), Language and social history: Studies in South African sociolinguistics. Cape Town: David Philip. 104126.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger, & Wright, Susan. (1986). Endogeny versus contact: “Afrikaans influence” on South African English. English World-Wide 7:201224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malan, Robin. (1972). Ah big yaws: A guard to Sow Theffricun Innglissh. Cape Town: David Philip.Google Scholar
MacMahon, Michael. (1994). Phonology. In Romaine, S. (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. 4: 1776–1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 373535.Google Scholar
McKinney, Carolyn. (2007). “If I speak English, does it make me less Black anyway?”: “Race” and English in South African desegregated schools. English Academy Review 24(2):624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. (1992). English in language shift: The history, structure and sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. (2010). Sociophonetics and social change: Deracialisation of the GOOSE vowel in South African English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(1):333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend. (2012). Ethnicity, substrate and place: the dynamics of Coloured and Indian English in five South African cities in relation to the variable (t). Language Variation and Change 24(3):371397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik. (2011). Sociophonetics: An introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Erik R., & Kendall, Tyler. (2007). NORM: The vowel normalisation and plotting suite. Available at: http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/index.php. Accessed January 10, 2010.Google Scholar
Toefy, Tracey. (2014). Sociophonetics and class differentiation: A study of working- and middle-class English in Cape Town's coloured community. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cape Town.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter, & Hannah, Jean. (1985). International English: A guide to varieties of Standard English. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Van Rooy, Bertus. (2002). Stress placement in Tswana English: The makings of a coherent system. World Englishes 21:145160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Ida C. (1929). The phonetics of English. Cambridge: Heffer. [3rd ed., 1939].Google Scholar
Watt, Dominic, & Fabricius, Anne. (2002). Evaluation of a technique for improving the mapping of multiple speakers’ vowel spaces in the F1~F2 plane. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 9:159173.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English. Vol. 1: Introduction. Vol. 3: Beyond the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilmot, Kirstin. (2014). “Coconuts” and the middle class: Identity change and the emergence of a new prestigious English variety in South Africa. English World-Wide 35(3):306337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wissing, Daan. (2006). Het jou mô en pô ‘n strôndhuis by Hôrtenbos? Feit of Fiksie? Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 24(1):87100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., & Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: A professional framework for multimodality research. In: Proceedings of LREC 2006, Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Available at: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Accessed December 1, 2013.Google Scholar
Wood, Tahir (1987). Perceptions of, and attitudes towards, varieties of English in the Cape Peninsula, with particular reference to the ‘Coloured Community’. Master's thesis, Rhodes University, South Africa.Google Scholar
Worden, Nigel, Van Heyningen, Elizabeth, & Bickford-Smith, Vivian. (1998). Cape Town: The making of a city. Cape Town: David Philip.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Mesthrie supplementary material

Appendix A-B

Download Mesthrie supplementary material(File)
File 79.4 KB